Lohmann Park

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Lohmann Park is a I5-acre expanse just south of Thomas Paine School in southeast Urbana. It is the site of the University of lllinois Club Cricket Field and serves as a practice site for a local youth football league. It is also home to the district's only disc (Frisbee) golf course.

Disc golfers, who have formed a local club to conduct tournament-type competitions, must navigate through wooded areas as they follow the course that winds around a central meadow. The meadow has provided a site for launching of model rockets as well. Future improvements may include athletic fields. Park district planners say a study may need to be done in 2008 as to how the park can best serve the neighborhood, which is more densely populated now than when the site was acquired in 1963.

Like Blair Park, Lohmann Park is named for a former long-time park board commissioner. Professor Karl F. Lohmann died in 1963, the year the land was acquired. It was named several years later for him.

Lohmann had championed joint school-park site development, and the southeast Urbana site had been bought because of its proximity to the Paine School, much as Victory Park had been acquired forty-three years previously partially because of its proximity to a school.

Lohmann became a park commissioner in 1949, when he was selected to fill a vacancy on the board. He was elected board president in 1955 and held that position when he died. He also had served as chairman of the Champaign County Planning Commission and had helped establish the Champaign County Forest Preserve District. He was head of the planning and landscape architecture department at the University of lllinois. Lohmann joined the faculty in 1921.

Text from Mancuso, Dana L. (Ed.). (2007). A century of growth: the Urbana Park District's first 100 years. Urbana, IL: Urbana Park District

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Lohmann Park: Lohmann Park is located near Thomas Paine School and has many recreational opportunities including the nine-hole disc golf course and a cricket pitch.
Image Courtesy of the Urbana Park District
Disc Golf Score Card: Lohman Park's 15 acres includes a nine-hole disc golf course. Disc golf is a sport where participants throw a flying disc or frisbee at a target, usually a pole with a basket and chains. Played much like regular golf, the object is to get the disc in the target with as few throws as possible.
Image Courtesy of the Urbana Park DistrictUntitled ~